The Chaffetz and Coulter Distraction

Earlier this month, Rep. Chaffetz voted against Afghanistan war funding. While expressing appropriate skepticism, Dan McCarthy wrote last week:

With Chaffetz voting against the Afghan War and Ann Coulter breaking with Bill Kristol, the Right’s foreign policy for the next decade is far from settled.

I have made my view of Chaffetz’s “antiwar” position pretty clear already, so I won’t rehearse that again, but I do find it a little odd that Dan gives Coulter any credit for her column bashing Kristol. Consider one of the main points Coulter makes in her column:

Then Bush declared success and turned his attention to Iraq, leaving minimal troops behind in Afghanistan to prevent Osama bin Laden from regrouping, swat down al-Qaida fighters and gather intelligence.

Coulter cites the main foreign policy blunder of Bush’s Presidency as if it were the appropriate, correct course of action. Afghanistan was the one place where those of us with “some vague concept of America’s national interest” could at least see some justification for military action, and Coulter approves of the diversion away from that for the sake of an entirely unnecessary war against a government that posed no threat to the United States. One of the main reasons why there is still a U.S. presence in Afghanistan is that the “minimal troops” available after Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq were insufficient to prevent the regrouping of Taliban militias that threatened the “American-friendly government” established in Kabul.

Those “minimal troops” were also so spread out in the countryside that they had to rely heavily on air power to protect themselves against attack, which resulted in many civilian deaths, and that in turn created waves of “accidential” insurgents. All of this significantly compounded the security problems in the country, which the previous administration was mostly content to neglect. It is this same policy of neglect that created the poor security conditions in recent years that Coulter praises and wants the current administration to emulate. For his part, Chaffetz objects to the war in Afghanistan largely because U.S. forces have their “hands tied,” which means that he dislikes stricter rules of engagement that are designed to prevent civilian casualties.

It is hard to get around the reality that Coulter’s column is full of pro-Iraq war lies. For example, she writes:

Iraq had a young, educated, pro-Western populace that was ideal for regime change.

Surely if there was one thing that everyone could agree on by now, it is that most of the population was not particularly “pro-Western” as Coulter means it, and most of the educated professionals who could get away from the chaos created by the invasion fled the country en masse. The war for regime change that Coulter cannot stop defending gutted the Iraqi professional classes and robbed the country of many of its best-educated people, which is one of the reasons why Iraq is and will remain an economic basketcase. For that matter, decades of war and sanctions had significantly changed Iraqi society for the worse. So when Coulter says these things about Iraq, she is simply repeating standard pro-war propaganda c. 2002-03. Coulter calls for Bill Kristol’s resignation, but she is still reliably spouting the nonsense that he and so many other advocates of invasion were using to sell the war in Iraq. It’s as if she has put up a giant, blinking sign saying, “You cannot trust a word I say,” and everyone seems to have missed it.

I’m not trying to overlook opportunities for the antiwar right, and I don’t like being the constant naysayer who has to keep pointing out that Chaffetz, Coulter et al. cannot be taken seriously, but just judging by their own arguments they cannot be taken seriously. The “to hell with them” hawks may be up for grabs, but they are unlikely to be won over by people who don’t harbor irrational fears about Iran and who believe that the Iraq war was a strategic disaster for the United States, because these people remain very aggressive hawks who perceive threats where none exists.

When you have a House member who votes against funding for the war in Afghanistan, but would never dream of voting against Iraq war funding and wants the President to “take out” Iran’s nuclear facilities, you do not have someone coming to these conclusions based on anything resembling a sober understanding of the limits of American power or the national interest. At the very least, there has to be some honest accounting that overwhelming Republican and mainstream conservative support for the Iraq war was one of the worst mistakes they have made in decades, and there has to be some willingness to face up to the obvious lies that they embraced or happily repeated and recognize them as untrue. Simply turning Democratic rhetoric around and dubbing Iraq the “good war,” as Coulter has effectively done, merits contempt rather than sympathy.

MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

Hide 7 comments

7 Responses to The Chaffetz and Coulter Distraction

not to defend mann coulter here, but when she wrote “iraq had a young, educated, pro-western populace that was ideal for regime change,” perhaps she meant “had” in the sense that the only iraqis who fit that profile didn’t actually live in iraq..or maybe chalibi give her so many starbusts she was seeing multiple images…

If one coldly regards everything up to now as sunk costs, what is truly appalling is that apparently 1/3 of the GOP members of the House have signed on to a proposed resolution granting Israel an advance blank check to bomb Iran.

This is not so much out of the frying pan of cliché, as out of the campfire into the blast furnace. Invincible ignorance in this case leads not to salvation, but to the pit.

Daniel, I’m curious what you think about Joseph Farah’s about face? His position is still “Jacksonian” in that he implies that both wars could have been good if they had been fought right (get in, kick butt, get out), but he seems to go further in his change of heart than does Coulter.

I understand that Coulter and Farah are not now principled non-interventionists, but I do think we should be celebrating this sort of movement. ALL the movement has been in our direction. There has been no new movement in the direction of hawkishness and threat exaggeration. It is still the same old players and an ever shrinking core of listeners. Not that their former listeners have become non-interventionist either. They have just moved on.

Farah’s acknowledgment that he was wrong about Iraq makes a major difference. In Coulter’s case, it is just a matter of bashing a war that is now identified with a Democratic administration and defending one that most Republicans supported. Attacking Afghanistan while continuing to defend Iraq seems especially perverse to me, but it is in any case not the result of an honest accounting of Iraq. Farah concludes that he was wrong about both Iraq and Afghanistan. I question lumping them together as he does, but I can appreciate that there has been a change, and it is a welcome change.

I would like to as clear as I can on this. Nothing would make me happier than to have my skepticism proven wrong and to see conservatives across the board repudiate warmongering and unnecessary wars. I don’t expect and don’t need a full embrace of non-interventionist views, much less agreement with my particular take on major foreign policy questions, but what I do want to see and what I still don’t see in most cases is an understanding of how conservatives allowed themselves to go so awry. One reason why I am being so difficult about all of this is that I have seen antiwar conservatives jump at every small glimmer of hope for most of the last decade only to find that it was a mirage. The basic problem I have is that I find it difficult to trust people who blithely went along with the warfare state and reckless jingoism for years and have only just now discovered that it might not be good for America.

For that matter, I don’t want to be needlessly sectarian and preoccupied with old slights, but Farah railed about America being “under siege from Islamo-fascism” in his article rejecting Ron Paul’s candidacy. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this “siege” notion is alarmist and ridiculous, and his complete dismissal of the idea that U.S. policies contribute to blowback seems detached from reality. So on the one hand, it’s encouraging that someone who was that far out may have changed his mind, but on the other hand it is hard to believe that someone who was ranting about Islamo-fascism three years ago would genuinely oppose future wars if they were waged in the name of fighting so-called “Islamo-fascism.” To my mind, where someone stands on Iran tells me a lot more about his views than if he belatedly rejects very long, unpopular wars. When former Iraq war supporters begin applying the lessons from Iraq to Iran policy, that will really be something to celebrate.

Since the Cold War and especially after 9/11, conservatives have had their identity as conservatives so wrapped up in militarism and threats and American global leadership, etc. that I think it is very difficult for them to just drop it all and quickly transition to its opposite. This sort of Jacksonian skepticism about nation building and long wars seems to possibly offer a sort of middle ground in the transition.

Also, while I agree that Coulter’s defense of the Iraq War made her column a mess and less grounds for enthusiasm than some thought, I think the fact that she identified neocons by name in the column as something other than what she is and having a philosophy something other than what she has was encouraging.